Patch after patch the offlane is becoming harder and harder to play effectively. The inability to pull the first wave, creeps meeting closer to the enemy tower, and the predominance of support heroes have made the offlaners’ life miserable and the “suicide” lane worth its title.

Leshrac's win rate dropped by nearly 10 points when he was hit with the nerf bat in 6.85. But since then, he's been getting slowly tweaked and buffed patch over patch, inching his way back into the meta.

Economy patches in Dota 2 are rarely exciting. For the majority of players small changes to the gold values rarely have a visible impact, however the changes introduced in 7.15 are hard to ignore. After all, they pretty much added four new objectives to the map.

Clinkz is in an interesting spot right now: despite being one of the most successful heroes in high level pubs, he is still completely ignored in the competitive scene. Recent EPICENTER XL only had seven heroes that were neither picked nor banned and Clinkz was one of them.

A week has passed since the introduction of 7.14—probably the last balance patch of this magnitude before the International 2018. By reworking several items and fine-tuning the balance of the game, Valve balance team managed to significantly improve the state of both competitive and pub metas.

Slark was once the bane of pubs and a potential menace in competitive play. As the meta has shifted away from his playstyle, along with changes to Hex and the removal of Poor Man’s Shield, Slark has fallen into obscurity. With stats getting a rework in 7.13, Slark may be right on the cusp of reappearing in the meta.

EPICENTER XL kicks off in Moscow, with Team Liquid having a chance to both defend their Champion title and win the first Major of the season. Dota 7.14 releases, introducing major changes to the hero balance and stirring controversy among professional players. The last Majors of the season have their participants finalized.

Dota 7.14 is a massive balance patch introducing a lot of smaller changes to the hero and item balance. It will undeniably have an impact on the metagame and some of the general changes will also probably change how certain roles are perceived. In fact, there is an argument to be made that the whole laning stage might become very different.

One of the biggest problems of leaving ranked play for a prolonged period of time is that returning to it can be problematic. Loss of your muscle memory, games sense, and knowledge of the meta can lead to a devastating losing streak. All your hard work gaining precious MMR can all be wasted in just a few games where you didn’t perform to the best of your ability.

This week ESL One Birmingham wrapped up their regional qualifiers, French football club Paris Saint-Germain partners with LGD, and the Dota community scrutinizes some of the invited teams for the China Supermajor.

Dota 7.13 patch introduced massive changes to the hero attributes, while considerably slowing down the game. Naturally, changes in the meta were to be expected and in fact, in the first couple of days the patch created quite a lot of balance issues. Luckily, they were quickly dealt with in the 7.13b update.

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